Defector: Soviet Generals Studied Lasers In Space 15 Years Ago

November 15, 1985|By Robert A. Liff, Sentinel Miami Bureau

MIAMI — Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the United States, said Thursday he talked with Soviet generals about laser missile-defense systems in space as much as 15 years ago in Moscow.

Shevchenko, after a breakfast speech to 1,500 people, said that despite Soviet denials now the generals were well into research into what appeared to be a version of the Reagan administration's strategic defense initiative, widely called Star Wars.

''They already had been looking at how the laser could be used or the particle beam could be used,'' Shevchenko said. ''These were talks with very high-level Soviet generals on the general staff, people involved in what we call in this country the military-industrial complex. It was not one conversation. It was several conversations.''

Shevchenko, 55, was an undersecretary-general of the United Nations in New York when he defected to the United States in 1978.

Since his defection, which included two years of spying for the United States before finally escaping from the Soviet U.N. Mission in New York, Shevchenko has written his memoirs and become wealthy as a lecturer and writer, drawing fees as high as $20,000 for one speech.

He spoke Wednesday morning at a forum sponsored by Northern Trust Bank at the Omni Hotel.

President Reagan, countering Soviet attacks on U.S. research into the space-based defense, repeatedly has said that the Soviets long have been involved in such research.

Shevchenko took part in some of the early arms negotiations in Geneva on the Soviet side. He wrote in his book that Soviet leaders thoroughly hamstring their representatives and give them no flexibility in such negotiations.

In his speech, Shevchenko said Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev should be seen as an orthodox communist and his success in public relations should not lead people to mistake his style for new substance.

And he told two jokes in vogue in Moscow that reflect the Soviet leadership's change from the near-moribund series of aging leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev to the younger, more vigorous Gorbachev.

''They used to say that Brezhnev was dead for quite a while but he didn't know it because successor Konstantin Chernenko didn't tell him,'' Shevchenko said.

''Now the joke is 'Who supports Gorbachev?' and the answer is: 'Nobody, because he can walk himself.' ''